Katherine Jenkins dreams of motherhood

Katherine Jenkins, after breaking up with Gethin Jones, talks frankly of how
she would love to have children

Katherine JenkinsPhoto: Rex Features

By Tim Walker

5:30AM BST 08 May 2012

After breaking off her engagement with Gethin Jones, the former Blue Peter presenter, Katherine Jenkins is feeling broody.

“I hope I’m lucky enough to have children one day,” says the 31-year-old Welsh mezzo-soprano. “I come from a big family and children are a gift.”

She admits, too, to a crush on Patrick Dempsey. “I need a McDreamy in my life,” says Jenkins, referring to the character that the American actor plays in the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.

After the concerns that were expressed about her recent dramatic weight loss, she says that he is tucking into a lot of comfort food. For her, beans on toast always does the trick. “I crave something simple,” she says.

Boris Johnson emailed all of his activists over the weekend to thank them for helping him to see off Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral election. “I feel like some overweight Alpinist carried on the shoulders of others to the summit of a great mountain,” Johnson self-deprecatingly informed them.

Although it was a fight to the finish, one of the first men to assure Johnson that he had it in the bag was, interestingly, Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel magnate. “He put in a personal call to Boris late on Thursday afternoon to offer his congratulations,” says my man at City Hall.

“He has a good political instinct, but I need hardly add that, at that time, no one else was taking it for granted.”

Balls’s war chest

Even though the turn out was desultory, Ed Miliband may be feeling a little safer in his job after the local election results. Still, the Labour leader would be well advised to keep an eye on Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor.

The latest register of members’ interests shows that Miliband hasn’t received a penny in donatons lately. Balls, in the course of a month, has been in receipt of £60,000. Lord Bhattacharyya gave £10,000 and the Co-Operative Group the rest.